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AMD Zen4/Zen5 IPMI Thermal Driver for ESX Fling

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Happy Friday! šŸ„³

A couple of weeks back, Wenchao (creator of the Realtek Network Driver for ESX Fling) reached out to me to share an exciting development he had been working on.

Unlike traditional enterprise hardware, which typically includes an Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) for exposing various hardware statistics, consumer systems like the popular Minisforum MS-A2 lack this capability out of the box.

Wenchao has developed a pseudo-IPMI driver for AMD Zen 4 and Zen 5 platforms that surfaces the CPU thermal and I am excited to share this will be released as a new Fling!


In addition to viewing this information via the vSphere UI, usersĀ can also retrieve the raw metrics via ESXCLI:

esxcli hardware ipmi sdr list


The driver currently supports the following:

  • ESX 9.1
  • ESX 9.0.x
  • ESX 8.0 Update 3

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Quick Tip: Workaround for NSX Edge Upgrade to VCF 9.0.1 running AMD Ryzen CPUs

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If you are planning to upgrade to latest release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0.1 and you are using an AMD Ryzen (consumer) processor, you will need to apply an additional workaround after your NSX Edges have been upgraded, for proper functionality.Ā This is similar to the workaround that I had shared back in 2020, which is needed when deploying a new VCF 9.x environment due to the incompatibility of NSX Edges running on an AMD Ryzen CPU.

UPDATE (01/20/26) - VCF 9.0.2, the structure of the config.py has changed, you will need to identify the correct lines to comment out the AMD section. There is a more simpler workaround that can now be applied for all VCF releases, which you can find more details in this blog post HERE.

After the NSX Edge node has been upgraded, the modifications to the original system files are not persisted and we need to re-apply the changes before the NSX Edge nodes will run properly.

Thanks to Tomas Fojta for sharing this tidbit while upgrading his environment, which happens to run on an AMD Ryzen system.

Step 1 - SSH to the NSX Edge node as root

Step 2 - Edit /os_bak/opt/vmware/nsx-edge/bin/config.py and comment out L192-193 containing the AMD section and that will allow the NSX Edge to properly startup and complete the upgrade flow.

NVMe Tiering with AMD Ryzen CPU workaround for VCF 9.0

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If you have an AMD Ryzen processor and you are planning on use the NVMe Tiering feature with either VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, you will need to apply the following workaround for your VMs to properly boot.

Note: This workaround is only required on AMD Ryzen (Consumer) CPU with NVMe Tiering enabled and does not affect AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon or IntelĀ  Core (Consumer) CPUs with our without NVMe Tiering.

On an AMD Ryzen CPU that has NVMe Tiering enabled, when powering on a VM, you might notice the operating system does not fully boot and the VM console may become unresponsive. After spending some time debugging with Engineering, it looks like there are some issues with specific AMD Ryzen CPU instructions that is causing the VM to behave this way when NVMe Tiering is enabled.

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